Blacks' Hopes For

Change Are Modest

April 27, 1994|By BILL KELLER The New York Times

MANDELA PARK, South Africa — The question that most worries the lame-duck whites whose monopoly on power began seeping into history on Tuesday, and privately worries the next government, too, is couched in cautionary phrases about "unrealistic expectations."

But it amounts to this: What do South African blacks want?

They are often accused of aspiring too high, of threatening to overwhelm the new government with a greedy tide of demands, of expecting to occupy suburban estates overnight and be served poolside cocktails by their former oppressors.

The answer from a field of squatter shacks in Mandela Park is that the expectations are as modest as a flush toilet, as elementary as human dignity.

"What big mansion?" hooted Jack Mokoape, an out-of-work bank teller, grinning at the dreams ascribed to him by fearful whites. "What big mansion, if you can't pay for it? I'm living with people who can think. They know the election doesn't mean then you are going to have a mansion."

A job would be nice, he said. Or an indoor faucet, he said. But even such modest miracles "will not happen overnight."

"The main thing, I just hope we will be equal," he said.

The realism of Mandela Park is reflected too in opinion polls and interviews at other have-not settlements, and it suggests that the voting exercise this week is, to some extent, its own reward.

"We have done more polling on this than on any other issue," said Lawrence Schlemmer, who has surveyed black expectations as head of a nonpartisan polling project for the Institute of Multiparty Democracy.

"They expect to be treated with dignity," he said. "Their status as a human being, as a South African, is non-negotiable. Quite frankly, I feel that this election is more about honor and status than it is about houses and jobs."

There are, no doubt, have-nots poised to seize whatever opportunity presents as white power recedes.

This squatter village, in fact, was born in an earlier surge of opportunism, unwittingly loosed by the man it was named after, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela.

It was Mandela's release from prison in 1990 that emboldened blacks from Pretoria townships to invade this vacant land east of the capital and erect a subdivision out of scrap.

"Before that, you'd be in prison," said Cecilia Mokone, who was among the first invaders of a community that now numbers 30,000 people. "Mandela, when he was released, he said the land is nobody else's but God's, and people should be free."

Although their experience of inflated white wealth invites them to want more, the people of Mandela Park, at least, make distinctions between equal lifestyles and equal opportunity.

"Let them have it," said Jane Modisakeng, 29, a homeless housewife, speaking of what whites have accumulated in their centuries of advantage. "No one will tamper with it. But that should come to an end, where they have it so easy. Now we must all start off with an equal chance."